Aby Warburg (1866-1929) hat mit seinen kulturwissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen und der Programmatik seiner Bibliothek auch auf die philosophische Problemlage der Zeit reagiert. Für zentrale Bereiche philosophischer Kulturtheorie lieferte er begriffliche und strukturelle Vorschläge, seine Sensibilität für offene oder verdrängte Fragen der Kulturtheorie macht ihn zu einem wichtigen Gesprächspartner im kulturphilosophischen Dialog. Bislang wurde jedoch sein Denkweg aus philosophischer Sicht kaum dargestellt. Bernd Villhauer unternimmt den Versuch, nicht nur in Warburgs Entwicklungsweg, seinem Aufgreifen des theoretischen Materials aus den positivistischen wie idealistischen (...) Ansätzen des 19. Jahrhunderts, sondern auch in seinen kulturtheoretischen Fragmenten die Konturen einer spezifischen Vorstellung von Kulturanthropologie und Kulturpsychologie zu entfalten. Die Ambivalenz des Symbols und seine Anbindung an elementare Orientierungsversuche des Menschen vor dem Hintergrund einer Kulturtheorie, die sowohl Lamprechtschen als auch Burckhardtschen Vorgaben zu entsprechen sucht, sind unter anderen die spannungsreichen Voraussetzungen Warburgschen Denkens. Beeinflussungen durch Carlyle, Vignoli und Auseinandersetzungen mit kulturgeschichtlichem Positivismus treten hinzu. Daß diese theoretischen Voraussetzungen nur teilweise amalgamiert werden konnten, läßt sich an der Theorie deutlich ablesen, macht aber auch ihre Interpretationsfähigkeit und damit Wirkmächtigkeit aus. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird in diesem Buch den unveröffentlichten Fragmenten gewidmet. In ihnen sind auf unsystematische Art die wesentlichen Ansätze zu einer eigenen Kulturphilosophie gegeben. Im Vergleich mit den neukantianischen Modellen, der Kulturtheorie Max Webers und verschiedenen Konzepten des Symbolischen lässt sich das Warburgsche Menschenbild nachzeichnen. Seine Kulturentwicklungstheorie thematisiert die Angst und den mühsamen Souveränitätsgewinn als entscheidende Elemente. Kulturtheorie aus dem Geiste einer Handlungstheorie des 19. Jahrhunderts: der Versuch, Übergänge vom Tier- ins Menschenreich zu beschreiben, von der Flucht des erschreckten Tieres zum Ausmalen von Renaissance-Kirchen und Beschreibungen des Sternenhimmels. (shrink)

Laboratory manuals, notebooks and instrumentation from Otto Warburg’s Institute of Cell Physiology have been discovered at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. Following Warburg’s death in 1970 one of his technicians was transferred from Berlin-Dahlem to the newly founded biochemical institute at Martinsried near Munich, and brought with him these resources, which epitomize the singular position of Warburg’s work style and institute in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the technician’s skills and apparently outmoded instrumentation like the (...) class='Hi'>Warburg apparatus were still used in the context of 1970s membrane biochemistry, this trove also documents an unexpected continuity of research within the life sciences. Moreover, the service of Warburg’s technician, which spans more than four decades, as well as the meticulous documentation of preparations and experiments, serve as a case in point for the importance of routine and rather mundane techniques in the post-war molecular life sciences. (shrink)

Contents: K. Ludeking, The Body and the Letters Albrecht Durer s self-portrait from 1500; E. Osterkamp, Spartacus under the Germans on the history of a literary legacy; F. Forster-Hahn, German, Modern and Jewish Max Liebermann s 1906 exhibitions in Berlin and London; U. Haselstein, A Genealogy of Modernity Flaubert, Cezanne, and Gertrude Stein; C. Asendurf, Bodies in Force Fields Art War and Spatial Theory in Classical Modernity.".

In June 1927, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg celebrated "forty years of bibliophily". On the occasion of the sixtieth birthday of his brother Max, Aby Warburg organized a guided tour of his library and a photographic exhibition presented with original documents: one example of the practical side of the "Bild und Wort" method. These two terms were used by Aby Warburg to describe a theme of his research, namely the complex relation between iconographic and textual tradition and the (...) theory of the function of the human visual memory. At the same time, "image and word" were research tools, experimented by Warburg in structuring his lectures as reading plus slideshow plus guided visit of the panels and in creating a photographic collection in his Library. It was from this lecturing and exhibiting practice, and from the desire to collect and disseminate his research in a suitable manner, that Warburg’s project for an atlas-book, entitled Mnemosyne, took its origin and form. "The" Mnemosyne was intended to be a work dedicated to the investigation of the dynamics of the Western tradition and its cultural memory, focusing on the examples provided by the "posthumous life" of antiquity during the Renaissance. (shrink)

Parts of the book date back to and some of the concluding remarks on ethics and the will may have been composed still earlier, when Wittgenstein admired ...

Explanation is a perennially hot topic in philosophy of science. Yet philosophers have exhibited a curious blind spot to the questions of how explanatory projects develop over time, as well as what processes are involved in generating their developmental trajectories. This paper examines these questions using research into the end-Permian mass extinction as a case study. It takes as its jumping-off point the observation that explanations of historical events tend to grow more complex over time, but it goes beyond this (...) observation by scrutinizing the processes responsible for generating this pattern. Surveying several decades of research into the end-Permian extinction, I suggest that the principal “driver” of explanation in geohistory is non-explanatory work: work that is undertaken to increase our descriptive understanding of a phenomenon, not to test a particular explanatory claim. Non-explanatory work drives explanation by imposing or eliminating demands on explanation, and by furnishing new resources for constructing explanatory models. Explanations grow more complex because the demands on explanation tend to increase with ongoing characterization of the target phenomenon, and characterization tends grows the roster of explanatory resources. However, the fact that non-explanatory work sometimes eliminates demands on explanation means that this trend is not irreversible. I suggest that to achieve a more rounded view of the dynamics of explanation, philosophers should ask how research into complex phenomena is organized, as well as how explanatory progress depends upon the coordination of different kinds of material and epistemic resources. (shrink)

This introduction to the aesthetics and sociology of music of the German philosopher and music theorist T. W. Adorno is the only book to deal comprehensively with this topic and it has quickly established itself as a classic text.

Brings together some of the most prominent and influential contemporary interpreters of Adorno's work in a wide-ranging collection of essays that explores Adorno's relation to themes and problems in postmodern thought.

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author’s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy and twentieth-century thought. They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian (...) theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of _dynamis_ and its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”. (shrink)

This paper analyses the hegemony of the growth paradigm through the example of its naturalisation in capitalist production and consumption relations. Applying a combination of theoretical elements from the Marxian tradition, the Regulation approach and Bourdieusian sociology, emphasis is placed on how the growth imperative is reflected in people's minds and bodies. It becomes hegemonic because it appears to be the natural way of steering economy and society. As a result, all people – including working people – benefit from the (...) continuation of growth. To overcome the growth paradigm, activists would need to build on a crisis of the ‘objective’ structures of economy and society. (shrink)

This philosophy book is written for students who are not interested in philosophy or who are struggling to understand it. Professor Malikow makes it easy to understand the sophisticated ideas and profound truths of philosophy by his use of everyday language, analogies, examples, and humor.

“The composition of the lectures of which Aristotle's extant works are the notes probably belongs in the main to the twelve or thirteen years of tail headship of the Lyceum, and the thought and research implied, even if we suppose that some of the spadework was done for him by pupils, implies an energy of mind which is perhaps unparalleled. During this time Aristotle fixed the main outlines of the classification of the sciences in the form which they still retain, (...) and carried most of the sciences to a further point than they had hitherto reached; in some of them, such as logic, he may fairly claim to have had no predecessor, and for centuries no worthy successor…one of the greatest of analytic thinkers. “SIR W. DAVID ROSS, Aristotle. (shrink)

Gegründet im Jahr 1859, zählt die Juristische Gesellschaft zu Berlin zu den ältesten ihrer Art in Europa und blickt auf eine lange Tradition zurück. In der Schriftenreihe der Juristischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin erscheinen seit 1959 ausgewählte Beiträge aus dem reichhaltigen Vortrags- und Veranstaltungsprogramm der Gesellschaft mit dem Ziel, der juristischen Wissenschaft und Praxis in der Hauptstadt ein anspruchsvolles Forum zu bieten.

There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus . It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would (...) like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm. 1. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity is one of the bestknown, but also most controversial works of Critical Theory. Many philosophers, writers and editorialists have attacked the text in recent decades and accused Adorno of cultivating his own “jargon”. In his book, Adorno develops a critique of metaphysical and theological language, which he observed in Germany from the 1920s up to the 1960s. In my paper, I argue that the mode of critique Adorno deploys is still relevant today, even if (...) its object has largely disappeared. This becomes clear in comparison to the language criticism of the analytical tradition, namely logical empiricism or Harry G. Frankfurt’s critique of “bullshit,” which are comparably more widespread today in academic debates. While Adorno examines linguistic expressions in terms of their social content and places them in a historical constellation, the critique of “bullshit” following Frankfurt remains constrained to a personal approach. In the language criticism of logical empiricism, on the other hand, the possibility of understanding linguistic phenomena as expressions of social conditions is still present. From this comparison, much can be learned for an up-to-date language criticism. (shrink)

There are universals of language; but is it also true, as the target article claims, that there are universals of reading? We believe there are no such universals, and invite others to refute our claim by providing a list of some universals of reading. If there are no universals of reading, there cannot be a universal model of reading.